The Dialectic of Master and Slave - Chapter 249

Volumes 1-4 + Side Stories of DMS are available uncensored on ko-fi! ※ This work contains depictions of coercive relationships, explicit language, and other graphic content. Reader discretion is advised.

If anything, a single sip of water given half-heartedly might only leave them thirsty for the rest of their lives. But still—if one girl learned to read and taught her sisters, if they read books to gain knowledge in fields that interested them, if they married and taught their own daughters to read, and if those daughters grew up to teach their children in turn… wouldn’t things be better than they are now? Even if it took a very, very long time. So Jaha resolved to keep at this tutoring job, unsuited as she was for it, for as long as possible. Money had nothing to do with it.

‘Money can always be earned some other way.’

Steeling herself, Jaha turned the corner. Just one block over, the quiet streets from before were now packed with so many people it was hard to move.

A line stretched endlessly long. Its members varied—men who looked like nobles, shabby elderly women, young and old, men and women, all mixed together.

“If I’m chosen as the lucky winner this time, I’ll pay off all my gambling debts in one go…”

“Lady Paltya, please grant me your blessing!”

“If I win, I can finally treat my mother’s illness…”

“It’s real. I had a good dream last night.”

“They say you’ll never have to work another day in your life. Even if it’s just pocket change now, it could change your whole future—you’ve got to try.”

Ignoring the chatter around her, Jaha pushed through the bustling crowd, squeezing forward bit by bit. After struggling for a while, she finally reached the source of this grotesquely long line—the front of a shop.

People who had been glaring at her, ready to accuse her of cutting in, immediately lost interest when she headed not for the shop but for the entrance leading upstairs.

Passing through the magical security barrier, Jaha slumped into the office, exhausted.

“I think we might have to move the office somewhere else.”

“I agree. It’s been so crowded since morning, some of us couldn’t even get to work. Shall I prepare some tea?”

“Yes. The usual.”

Madame Mirié, a warm-faced middle-aged woman, skillfully brewed and brought the tea. Having once worked as a servant for a wealthy merchant couple, she was sharp and efficient, excelling at secretarial duties.

“Well, not that I don’t understand the hype. Honestly, I bought five tickets myself.”

“I told you not to buy them. Like I said before, the more you buy, the more you lose. Mathematically speaking, the odds of matching five out of sixty-nine numbers plus one out of the twenty-six in the crystal ball are almost one in three hundred million…”

“No matter how much you explain it, numbers that big don’t even feel real. And winners keep getting drawn, don’t they?”

“That’s due to the law of large numbers—”

“Ah, for my mental well-being, I’d rather not hear it. And honestly, isn’t this a bit rich coming from the person who made the ‘Crystal Ball’?”

Struck by Madame Mirié’s retort, Jaha fell silent.

She was right. The crowd gathered outside was there to buy lottery tickets for the “Crystal Ball,” sold in the shop on the first floor of the building.

The “Crystal Ball” was a lottery system copied exactly from America’s “Powerball”—only with the red Powerball replaced by a crystal ball.

The reason was actually simple. She had agonized over how to make money, only to conclude that no matter what she did, she needed capital to get started. A situation where she needed money to earn money, but to earn money, she needed money first.

“Ah, if only this world had something like the lottery…”

Frustrated, Jaha let out an absentminded sigh—and that very sigh gave her an idea.

This world doesn’t have a lottery? Really? Then what if I’m the one to introduce it here…?

When she thought about it, there was no profit model as brilliantly exploitative as the lottery.

In a lottery, the prize pool is 50% of total ticket sales—meaning if 10 billion won worth of tickets are sold, only half (5 billion) goes to the winners. The remaining 5 billion? 800 million is distributed to authorized retailers, and 4.2 billion goes to the government, the issuing body. But it doesn’t end there. Of the 5 billion prize pool, 800 million is taxed, so winners actually receive 4.2 billion, while the government pockets 5 billion.

By merely issuing lottery tickets, the government earns more than the total prize money given to all winners combined. No wonder lotteries are called “a tax on people bad at math.”

From that moment, Jaha researched meticulously: whether similar profit models existed, legal grounds for regulation upon introduction, alternative technologies to implement the system, whether she’d need to join a commerce guild approved by the lord to conduct business, and so on.